Wednesday December 05, 2018

Chrome 71 arrives today, and comes the usual slew of fixes and improvements. Among other things, Chrome will now block websites that abuse the Speech Synthesis dictation API, and the devs added support for displaying relative times. But the most major change is probably the update to Chrome's internal adblocker. The browser already blocks ads that Google marks as an "abusive experience" by default, but as they announced in a blog post last month, Google is expanding this definition.

In fact, more than half of these abusive experiences are not blocked by our current set of protections, and nearly all involve harmful or misleading ads. These ads trick users into clicking on them by pretending to be system warnings or "close" buttons that do not actually close the ad. Further, some of these abusive ad experiences are used by scammers and phishing schemes to steal personal information.